Hey Fugro…Ever Seen the Movie “The Perfect Storm”?

You’d better take your seasick pills with you because that’s where Statoil is sending you to go shoot seismic…

Fugro C-Class Seismic Vessel. These 108 meter long ships can deploy up to sixteen 8,000-meter long, fully steerable, seismic streamers used for detailed analysis of the earth's crust.

It’s a $40 million contract however and Fugro’s C-Class seismic ships are certainly up to the task.

Statoil plans to use Fugro’s services in an area located 350 kilometers off Newfoundland’s eastern coast and just to the west of the treacherous Flemish Cap. Due to the convergence of tropical Gulf Stream and icy Labrador currents, this area is the is home to some of the most freakishly nasty waves and miserable weather on the planet and was made notorious by Sebastian Junger’s book and film,”The Perfect Storm”.

Far below the seafloor however, is a ridiculous amount of oil which is already being siphoned by the Terra Nova and SeaRose FPSOs as well as the world’s largest offshore platform, Hibernia.

Next to be developed is the Hebron, a gravity-based (aka non floating) production facility that will be operated by ExxonMobil Canada (36%) with JV partners, Chevron (26.7%), Statoil (9.7%), Petro-Canada (22.7%), and Nalcor (4.9%). This field was discovered in 1981 and is estimated to hold between 400-700 million barrels of recoverable resources.

The production facility, like Hibernia, will be capable of withstanding a strike by an iceberg, however due to it’s location in relatively shallow water, and anti-iceberg measures (think world’s largest lasso), icebergs are not a significant concern.